1. Made in Japan - Jon Lord (Deep Purple)2. Welcome Back to the Show that Never Ends... - Keith Emerson (ELP)3. Live at the Star Club Hamburg - Jerry Lee Lewis4. Yessongs - Rick Wakeman (Yes)5. 11-17-70 - Elton John

Last edited by The Man on Sun Oct 31, 2010 4:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How did Elton John beat Emerson, Wakeman, and Lord to a top spot for the Live Albums list?

Made in Japan should be #1 because of its massive influence on rock keyboard playing in general. It was one of the first live albums to demonstrate what a rock keyboardist was truly capable of, and Jon Lord's organ-guitar battles with Ritchie Blackmore showed that a keyboardist could easily do whatever a guitarist could do.

Welcome Back My Friends should be #2 because of its technicality and for having some of the first truly amazing live synthesizer playing.

The Yessongs for the same reason.

Then JLL and maybe Elton. I haven't heard anything about 17-11-70's actual influence on piano playing in general.

Yeah I wasn't sure. Head Hunters definitely is a funk album in every sense of the word though, and it seems like excluding it would be like excluding James Brown from the Greatest Rock Frontmen list. It was extremely influential in the development of funk because of its use of the Moog as a bass instrument and the replacement of guitar with clavinet.

I added the stuff with Worrell on it for the same reason. They were ridiculously influential on the use of keyboards in rock music.

And for Ratledge, here's an insane performance demonstrating what an organ was capable of, even before Jon Lord. The guy is ridiculously underrated everywhere except prog circles.:

Wendy Carlos - Switched-On Bach (1968) (This album started the Moog craze in 1968, and its influence is often overlooked, given the fact this record is more or less obscure to not-so-dedicated listeners. In terms of quality, it is actually classical music played on a synthesizer. What else could be more progressive? I'm pretty sure its seriousness alone would outdo the quality of many of the keyboard attempts of some of the lesser prog rock bands who managed to expose good keyboards playing through improvisation/jamming.) His other album, "The Well Tempered Synthesizer" was a slightly more refined effort, but, as far as I'm concerned, the original, influential piece, was S-OB. If there's an album to blame for the explosion of Moog abuse throughout the 70's, it would be this one, which beats Abbey Road (a more exposed early Moog album) by one year. It sold 500,000 copies, and, later, its impact led Stanley Kubrick to ask Wendy Carlos to produce the "futuristic" score for his 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.

Citing Wikipedia:

Entering Billboard's pop Top 40 charts on March 1, 1969, it climbed quickly to the Top 10; it stayed in the Top 40 for 17 weeks,[1] and in the Top 200 for more than a year. In the 1970 Grammy Awards, the album took three prizes: Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (with or without orchestra) and Best Engineered Classical Recording.Yes - The Yes Album

I was going to suggest "Switched-On Bach", but it's not really a rock or a keyboard album. It's all layered synthesizers, which pretty much makes it a studio engineering masterpiece. Remember that the first Moog synthesizer only had one working key at a time, so any and all chords and multi-hand parts had to be overdubbed.

So basically, it's not really eligible for the list, or I'd place it VERY high.

I actually think Strange Days could be Manzarek's highest. Not only does it feature one of the first uses of the Moog synthesizer, but there's just awesome stuff throughout - the harpsichord on Love Me Two Times, the trippy-as-hell organ sound on Unhappy Girl, the now legendary intro to When The Music's Over, etc.

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